This weekend, I had the opportunity to be a part of the fourth iteration of a great event called HRevolution. I’ve now been to three of the four HRevolution events and it is always an energizing, rewarding and thought provoking experience. If you work in HR or sell to HR, this is a great event to be a part of.
One of the themes that came up a couple of times during the discussions at the event yesterday was that a big thing holding HR back from significantly moving the needle within their organizations and making more substantial change is that we are always in search of the perfect solution. When we design a program or need to implement new software functionality, we tend to want a solution that delivers everything we want and need in one package. Because of this desire for the perfect solution, we set ourselves up for failure. When we don’t get the funding or support or buy-in we need on our perfect, all or nothing solution, we are back to the starting line.
It was commonly suggested that we could make greater progress in HR by looking for smaller and more iterative ways of driving change that don’t require extra budget or any permission from anyone else to make them happen. Here a few thoughts about how to do that.
- Maximize your current systems and tools. There were comments yesterday about how frequent it is that organizations implement a software solution, but only use a fraction of it’s capabilities. It’s likely that some of the tools you already have can do things you would really value. It’s a matter of being curious about capabilities and engaging your vendors in a conversation.
- Find out what you are doing that makes the most major impact and leverage that success to drive change. Think about the things you already do well (training, benefits enrollment, recruiting) and think about how you could make small tweaks to those processes to make progress on key issues.
- Work with the willing. We all have have managers and leaders within our organizations who are willing to try new things. Engage them to create small projects to test out ideas and concepts that might be challenging to sell on a broad scale without evidence that it works. We all have those partners within our organizations who trust us and are willing to be your guinea pig. Take advantage of those situations to try out new solutions and ideas on a small scale. Then, once you’ve made it work in this way and have evidence that your solution delivers results, you can tell the story to the rest of the organization.